Go on, spoil yourself

I have just been listening to a bunch of overtly ambitious people yapping on about how they started the Tate Modern using public funding and ignoring gifts from people like Charles Saatchi. If they were covertly ambitious, they would have joined the Foreign Office to get their knighthoods.

Getting a knighthood for feathering one's own nest must be the icing on the cake. They talk as if they removed the huge, rusting turbines with their own bare hands, whereas they probably didn't even point at it. They employ other people to do the pointing while they attend fund-raising dinner-parties and get pissed on champagne.

H.I. went to college with half of them, and she says that their driving ambition was evident even in those early days of the 1960s. This country is avery strange (starnge) place, because we have the time-honoured tradition of instinctively cutting down any tall poppies we happen across whilst walking down the path of life, but at the same time, if someone spends their whole life clammering for attention and getting themselves on every board or committee they can, we acknowledge their sickening behaviour with an award for a lifetime's acheivement.

In the U.S. successful people are publicly applauded, but here in the U.K. there is always some miserable misanthrope like me on hand to put them down.

Now I am going to use an old Trelawnyd trick to gain audience participation:

What do YOU deserve a knighthood for?